This paper explores ways of responding to the problems children and adolescents face in ways that include and honour the contributions of other family members. For example, parents and care-givers can be enlisted to help with scaffolding and outsiderwitnessing, as well as providing what the author refers to as ‘comemories’. The paper also discusses specific ways of working with children, such as keeping therapeutic conversations fun, regarding children as ‘story listeners’, opening space for conversations about difficult problems, and using therapeutic documents. How these considerations are put into practice is then documented in three accounts of working with children and adolescents on issues of anxiety, the death of a pet, and a parent’s diagnosis of cancer.

This paper shares the journey of the ‘Bellayla Project’, a co-research initiative between the author and two young people, Bella and Tayla. It describes how engagement in this project enabled second-story development in the lives of these two young people. It also conveys what becomes possible for young people when they are invited into a space of critical thinking, collective inquiry, and sharing knowledge about ‘problems’.

Diagnoses of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) continue to rise. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the United States of America suggested in 2007 that 1 in 150 eight-year-olds in the US has autism. In 2009 the CDC prevalence rose to 1 in 110. With the rising number of diagnoses, more families are impacted. Unfortunately, discourses surrounding ASD often present limited views and ways of working with these families. Using narrative practices, insider-knowledges can be privileged and guide professionals. This article presents ways that service providers can incorporate outsider-witnessing to elevate parents to ‘expert’ status, involve parents’ voices, and promote agency. It also includes a collective document of parents’ insider-knowledges which can be circulated to inform professionals and parents about the experiences of autism.

This paper discusses a practice innovation: a two-day, one-night group work process conducted with children who lived in households that use violence. The author developed the ‘My Happy Ending’ group work using narrative therapy principles and practices to respond to children in situations of family violence. The children were clients consulting with social workers or counsellors within the social service agency the author works in, Tampines Family Service Center in Singapore. As part of the practice innovation, the author created an original group work curriculum, consisting of the performance and narration of an original fictional story, and several play- and art-based activities. The purpose was to decrease the influence of family violence in the children’s lives and to increase their personal agency in dealing with it, using key narrative therapy practices. These narrative practices included externalisation of the problem, using metaphors, increasing people’s sense of personal agency, scaffolding preferred stories and identities, de-constructing discourses, outsider-witnessing, definitional ceremonies and creating collective documents. Narrative therapy practices were found to be helpful for enhancing children’s sense of agency and diminishing the influence of past and ongoing experiences of family violence and other difficulties faced in their daily lives.

This article describes ‘Circle’, a narrative group therapy approach used in a high-level residential treatment facility for young people involved in the child welfare, juvenile justice, or mental health systems. Most of the young people engaged in Circle have survived significant physical or sexual abuse or neglect and have been viewed, by others and themselves, as ‘severely emotionally disturbed’ or ‘dysfunctional’. Circle is intended to provide a space and opportunity for these young people to build a community of concern, and to identify and embrace preferred identities and directions for their lives. The work progresses through the following three stages: stage one – identifying what the young people give value to, exploring their preferred directions in life, and externalising problems; stage two – taking a stand for what the young people hold as important, negotiating their relationships with problems, and thickening the subordinate storylines of their lives; and stage three – stepping into preferred identities. Three exercises also are provided as illustrations of work completed in each stage of Circle.

Over the last decade, inspired by systemic family therapy and narrative approaches, Glenda and her teams in the UK have found ways to bring families, practitioners and communities together to respond to medical, mental health and social care crises. This work has taken place with children, adolescents, older people and people affected by intellectual disability and their families. This paper shares an inspiring story of this work and describes ways of ‘conducting’ and ‘weaving’ networks of hope.

2,021 Comments

Jocelyn Phelps - September 14, 2019

Thank you to Tileah for a wonderful presentation. I love hearing the word “yarn” used in this powerful way (Americans also have that term). The practice of “translating”, of shifting concepts into language that can be more usefully heard, is very powerful. As coaches we can make good use of this to help clients uncover their hidden or forgotten resources.

These stories are amazing examples of what we can discover when we hold onto our “beginner’s mind” and remember that the other person (client, patient) has the information and understanding, not us. We talk a lot in leadership development about “co-creating” and I think this is a beautiful example of two very complementary roles: the person who has the story and the person who helps to explore and shape it.

I like the idea of narrative – there is something about giving people the power to create a narrative, rather than simply appearing in a story told by someone else. Within the narrative metaphor, I especially enjoy the fabric metaphor – the idea of strands. These may touch each other, or not, may go well together in tone or color, or not. But again, there is some power in creating and weaving the narrative.
In my own work with coaching and leadership development, I find that the emphasis on narrative(s) helps make things more tangible, and therefore brings them to their true scale, instead of letting them take on imaginary and unclearly described proportions.

I love this. Telling our stories in ways that make us stronger. Such a powerful sentiment. Sometimes through trauma, it is hard to access the words that really encapsulate that experience – though using the written word does help us access those hard to utter parts of our memories … in those cases though perhaps the story we tell ourselves is not one that makes us feel strong in the first instance – so finding a way to tell that story in a way that focuses on the strength of surviving to tell that story is just amazing!

Login

Article search

Articles by date and issue

Facebook

Our other websites

Donate

Support our work!

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the Kaurna people who are the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which Dulwich Centre stands. We would also like to pay respect to the Elders of the Kaurna Nation, both past and present, and extend that respect to other Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders.